It’s surely not just coincidence that great journalism was pioneered, nurtured and celebrated at America’s great family-owned newspapers: The Wall Street Journal under the Bancrofts, The Los Angeles Times under the Chandlers, The Washington Post under the Grahams and The New York Times under the Sulzbergers.

Great journalism takes courage. It takes a sense of public mission. It takes independence. It takes time. Perhaps most of all, it takes money.

For decades, America’s great newspaper families had all of these. They shielded their editors and reporters from the pressures of advertisers and the short-term interests of public shareholders and Wall Street analysts. Subscribers were attracted to great journalism, advertisers followed, and big profits flowed to the family members and shareholders.

This week’s announcement that the Graham family had decided to sell The Washington Post and most of its publishing assets to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey Bezos, surely quashed any lingering doubts that the old model is all but dead.

The sale of The Post inevitably puts The New York Times in the spotlight: will the Sulzbergers succumb to the forces that led most every other major newspaper family to sell?

“It’s absolutely true that the family did not want to be out there all by themselves,” Alex Jones, author of “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind The New York Times,” and the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, told me this week. “They’re now the only iconic newspaper family, and it’s a lonely place to be.” Mr. Jones said he spoke to several family members after the Post announcement, and said they were shocked by the news. Nonetheless, “They’re absolutely committed to the stewardship of The New York Times,” he said.

The chairman and publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his cousin, Michael Golden, the vice chairman, confirmed that this week. In a statement, they said, “The Times is not for sale” and stressed that the company was “profitable and generates very strong cash flow, which we believe makes us perfectly able to fund our future growth.” They added, “The Times has both the ideas and the money to pursue innovation.”

That The Times and its controlling family would be among the last survivors should come as no surprise, since it is the strongest of the great newspapers journalistically, and it is profitable. The Times has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes since 1918, including four this year, more than any other newspaper. A week ago, The Times reported quarterly operating earnings of $77.8 million, up 13 percent from a year earlier.

By contrast, The Washington Post’s newspaper division had losses of $53.7 million last year, with no end in sight.

Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, who spoke to Mr. Sulzberger shortly after the sale was announced, told me this week: “I don’t think our deal has any implications whatever for The New York Times Company. The Post and The Times are completely different businesses, as different as, say, The Post and The Wall Street Journal. The Times is quite profitable and should be for a long time.”

But Mr. Graham also said the Post sale was not just about profits or money. As he put it in his letter this week to Post employees, “The point of our ownership has always been that it was supposed to be good for The Post.” He added, “The newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which we have no answers,” and concluded, “We were certain the paper would survive under our ownership, but we wanted it to do more than that. We wanted it to succeed.”

In the wake of the announcement, the Sulzberger family held two meetings, one with the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust, which owns a controlling stake in the company, and the other with the broader family, to discuss the Post sale and the decision to issue a statement from Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Golden. The family surely has much to discuss, because it faces the same question the Graham family did: Would The Times be better off both journalistically and financially under different ownership?

In stark financial terms, The Times is now a minnow in a sea of sharks. The Post will have the resources of Mr. Bezos’s personal fortune, which is estimated by Forbes at $25.2 billion, as well as whatever synergies he can realize from Amazon, which has a market capitalization of $135.2 billion. News Corporation, which owns The Wall Street Journal and other Murdoch newspaper interests, has a market cap of $9.3 billion (and it got $2.56 billion in cash and no debt when it was spun off from the company’s film and television assets). Bloomberg is private, but its owner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has a personal fortune estimated by Forbes to be $27 billion. And those are just three of The Times’s competitors. Facebook (market cap $93.86 billion) and Google ($297.27 billion) are new media digital competitors. Even Yahoo has a market cap of $30.08 billion.

Mr. Graham said his family had to ask “if our small public company was still the best home for the newspaper.” The Washington Post Company, including its education division Kaplan Inc., has a market capitalization of $4.38 billion. The New York Times Company’s is $1.79 billion.

Nearly everyone I spoke to this week praised The Times for what it has done with its resources. In contrast with Mr. Graham’s comment that he had no answers, The Times has articulated a strategy that addresses many of the pressing questions facing newspapers, and it seems to have been yielding results.

“The Times has pretty much done everything right, and it’s paying off,” said Steven Brill, a journalist, author and founder of Journalism Online, which uses a metered approach to charge for digital content. He praised the Times’s decision to charge online users for content. “Paying for content is the only way. New York Times earnings are improving. They’ve stabilized. Will it ever have the profit margins when it was a monopoly and you had to advertise? No. But the marginal profit margin on a digital subscription is close to 100 percent.”

Edward J. Atorino, a veteran media analyst at the Benchmark Company, one of a dwindling number of Wall Street analysts still covering The New York Times Company, said The Times “has a good strategy. They’ve got great national circulation. People will pay to read the paper. They are making money. The company isn’t growing, but at least it’s not losing money.” Mr. Atorino said that on the company’s most recent earnings conference call, “the degree of confidence was impressive,” adding, “They seem to think that circulation can carry the ball, online will grow, and in a few years they’ll be out of the woods.” Still, Mr. Atorino doesn’t recommend the stock. “The only reason to buy the stock would be a dramatic change,” he said.

Like The Post, The Times has tried to improve profitability by reducing costs, including the size of the newsroom. But that can go only so far before it begins to affect the quality of the news operation. It may be even more difficult if, as expected, Mr. Bezos invests in The Post’s national news operation. “The likelihood is that The Post and The New York Times will be competing head-to-head in a way they haven’t since the days of Abe Rosenthal and Ben Bradlee,” both legendary editors of The Post and The Times, Mr. Jones said. “The Times is already competing with Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, and now there’s no question The Times will have to match whatever force comes from The Post. The Post will become more formidable, especially on investigative and high-profile stories. For me as a citizen, this is great, because The Times will have to stay sharp.”

And these days, it’s not just reporters and editors that newspapers need to stay competitive, but far more costly software engineers. The Times needs the resources to exploit the data generated by Times users and to increase digital advertising revenue through search and targeted ad placement. “The New York Times would be very attractive to a Google,” said Scott Hemphill, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in intellectual property and antitrust law. And Google should be attractive to The Times, he said, since “The Times can never replicate Google’s scale and experience in advertising technology.” A newspaper, Professor Hemphill said, “is a natural partner for a Google, even more than for Amazon.” Other nontraditional potential partners might be Facebook, Microsoft or Yahoo, he added.

Google has said it isn’t interested in acquiring media companies. But users of Google need content to search, so Google has a broad, even vital, interest in making sure that quality content survives and flourishes. In ventures like YouTube and Zagat, it has moved squarely into the content arena. Other technology companies that were once content-averse, like Netflix, are now embracing it, too.

A Google spokeswoman said the company had no comment on The Times or the Bezos-Post deal.

A deal between The Times and a company like Google wouldn’t necessarily require a sale of The Times in the conventional sense, investment bankers said. Indeed, there might well be advantages to an ownership structure that would retain Sulzberger family control over the editorial product, both for the family as custodians of the Times’s journalistic legacy, and for Google, which already faces intense scrutiny over its pervasive influence.

And then there’s the much-talked-about prospect of Bloomberg, which combines the deep pockets and personal ambitions of New York’s soon-to-be-ex-mayor with a company that already has a large and growing news operation. Although Bloomberg, which generates most of its revenue and profits from the terminals used by traders and other financial professionals, offers less obvious synergies than companies like Google and Amazon, it would bring formidable financial strength to The Times. But Mr. Sulzberger was emphatic when responding to Bloomberg rumors last week, slapping the table and telling The Daily Beast that the Times is “Not. For. Sale.”

Since The Times doesn’t face the immediate pressure that The Post did, it may well have the opportunity over the next few years to see how its strategy works and how the media landscape evolves before making any major long-term decisions. But at some point, competitive forces may force the issue, as they did at The Post.

“The New York Times is an asset to the city and an asset to the world,” said Paul Steiger, a founder and executive chairman of ProPublica, the independent nonprofit newsroom, and a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. “It’s no shame for anyone to say they couldn’t make a financial go of a legacy newspaper. Who has? I know Don Graham, I admire him hugely, and I know how hard he was trying. What he has done is put The Post in strong financial hands. And there’s nothing that is better for a great newspaper than to be in strong financial hands.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Times In a Spotlight After the Sale Of The Post. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe